+- The Voynich Ninja (https://www.voynich.ninja)
+-- Forum: Voynich Research (https://www.voynich.ninja/forum-27.html)
+--- Forum: Analysis of the text (https://www.voynich.ninja/forum-41.html)
+--- Thread: qokeedy qokeedy qokedy qokedy qokeedy (/thread-4953.html)
Pages:
1
2
qokeedy qokeedy qokedy qokedy qokeedy - quimqu - 29-09-2025
I’m convinced (or at least for now I want to convince myself) that the Voynich has meaning. And I’ve been looking for an internally coherent way to explain how simply adding or removing e seems to “modify” words. One passage that really does my head in is these three lines on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
qokedy dy sheety qokedy qokeedy qokechdy lol
qokeedy qokeedy qokedy qokedy qokeedy ldy
yshedy qokeedy qokeedy olkeedy otey koldy
How can one write the "same" word so many times with such tiny variations across just three lines? What kind of puzzle is this? I know this is not new, neither the concludions, but I tried to get to some sort of explanation by my own.
Just for fun, an example of translation (I am not saying it is the translation!) that could fit this puzzle could be:
It moves now; it; it sees now; it moves now; it keeps moving; it moves back; then
it keeps moving, it keeps moving; it moves now, it moves now; it keeps moving; again
now it is seen; it keeps moving, it keeps moving; it keeps showing; it turns; it holds.
How on earth do I dare suggest something like this?
First, I don’t think qokedy, qokeedy, olkeedy... are nouns, adjectives, or adverbs here
- Not nouns: in these lines there isn’t a normal noun structure. You get long chains of the same form (qokedy/qokeedy…) with no clear head, no determiners, no case-like markers hanging off a main noun. Repeating a noun 4 or 5 times in a row with nothing else is odd prose.
- Not adjectives: adjectives usually sit next to a noun or after a copula ("X is Y"). Here, the repeated items stand on their own in a row; there’s nothing obvious they’re describing.
- Not adverbs/connectors: we actually see dy by itself in these lines (and also ldy). If anything is a connector/particle, that’s the better candidate. The bigger repeated forms look like clause heads, not side words.
Given the way these forms repeat as self-contained units, the only thing that really makes sense here is that they’re verbal particles, little bits that carry or mark an action. They behave like tiny predicate pieces you can string together. Read this way, the lines aren’t listing things or describing a noun; they’re doing things.
In this context -dy would work as a small grammatical piece (think "it/me/you" or a little helper like "is/does") that can appear alone (dy, ldy) or stuck to a root. The e before it (making -edy, -eedy, sometimes -eeedy) looks like a simple link/setting: sometimes you need it, sometimes you don’t, and sometimes you see a double ee.
So in these lines you’re seeing lots of root + (e/ee) + dy acting like mini-predicates: "verbish" units, lined up one after another.
Very briefly (from my counts on the whole corpus):
- qok is almost always at the start of the word (~99.6%). That makes it look like a root, not a suffix or filler.
- Endings for qok* split into two big families: a -dy/-edy/-eedy band (a big chunk), and a -ain/-aiin band (also big). The first band fits what we see on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (lots of qok-(e)-dy). The second band might be a different use of the same roots.
- olk looks similar to qok, but seems to “need” e before -dy even more strongly.
- sh is more flexible: both shedy and shdy exist, and sh also appears alone elsewhere.
Tiny but telling facts: qokdy is extremely rare (4 tokens), olkdy basically doesn’t occur, while shdy does (34). That feels like different root classes: some roots "want" or "need" the linking e, some don’t.
In short: across the manuscript, qok/olk/sh behave like roots, and -dy is the little piece that often comes after them, with e/ee as a simple on/off/stronger "setting".
RE: qokeedy qokeedy qokedy qokedy qokeedy - Jorge_Stolfi - 29-09-2025
Often a bizarre feature of Voynichese turns out to occur in other languages as well. Did you ever notice that the sequence "if it is" occurs rather often in English? In one of my English samples I find "if it is as". That near-repetition is not noticed there, because the reader sees the meaning of the words rather than the words themselves. But in the VMS we don't have the meanings, only the words...
Other things that may cause such near-repetitions:
The VMS manuscript has no punctuation. Consider:
"I would rather do that, than this thing. This thing that they want..."
"i would rather do that than this thing this thing that they want..."
There may be formulas that are inherently repetitive:
"called cauliflower, coliflower, calliflower, or kaleflower"
There may be incantations or charms:
"sanctus sanctus sanctissimus et sanctorum omnia..."
They may be numerals
"videt partes xii xiv xv xvii xviii"
They may be items in an enumeration of similar things:
"the demons are azrael, alzazel, alzuel, alarazel..."
And then the language may have many similar words, and the applicable literary standard may consider alliteration a feature, not a defect:
"Veni vidi vici"
"Ō tite, tūte, tatī, tibi tanta, tyranne, tulistī!
"A feir feld full of folk fond I þer bitwene"
"Dreaming dreams no one dared to dream before.”
"You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. ..."
"You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view...."
So it would be prudent to first define mathematically what would constitute a "repetitious phrase", and then test whether such a pattern also occurs in other comparable texts, such as "alchemical herbals" and medical treatises of the early 1400s.
And bear in mind that a negative result would show only that the VMS is not like those specific examples. It would not say anything about the language or encoding...
RE: qokeedy qokeedy qokedy qokedy qokeedy - quimqu - 29-09-2025
Thanks for the thoughtful reply, as always interesting!
I totally agree there are many ways that repetition can show up in texts, and surely we could generate even more examples. But as you say, we don’t know the meaning of the Voynich words. I just wanted to lay out some thoughts from the perspective of a non-linguist who is wrestling with transliterations and looking at the text like a data scientist.
Your "I would rather do that, than this thing. This thing that they want..." example is actually quite close to what I was trying to capture in my thread: each Voynich "word" might work like a small grammatical piece that strings together into clauses.
The "called cauliflower, coliflower, calliflower, or kaleflower" case feels less convincing to me here. qokedy / qokeedy / qokeeedy are scattered throughout the manuscript. An author might occasionally list variants, but usually they’d settle on one form (“coliflower”) across the whole text. Or at least is what intuition says to me.
The "sanctus sanctus sanctissimus..." type of repetition makes sense, and maybe the e / ee / eee alternation could indicate superlatives or inflections. My hesitation is that here a single character ("e") would have to cover multiple different grammatical roles, which feels a bit messy or hard to justify from a usability standpoint.
Numerals — yes, they could definitely be part of it, or formulas involving numbers. But then I’d expect the illustrations to play a stronger role in signaling that, and they don’t always match up (I know, that’s subjective).
And about "many similar words": in our case it’s really just a single character repeated 0, 1, 2 or 3 times. That makes them very similar words indeed.
(29-09-2025, 11:44 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.So it would be prudent to first define mathematically what would constitute a "repetitious phrase", and then test whether such a pattern also occurs in other comparable texts, such as "alchemical herbals" and medical treatises of the early 1400s.
I suspect these kind of repetitions have not been found as they would be a leading clue to solve the mistery.
Anyway, my post was mainly meant as a reflection on one of the toughest passages, where most (if not all) translation attempts break down: those three lines packed with qokedy, qokeedy, etc.
I thought it could be interesting to try a bit of "reverse engineering" to throw out a hypothesis starting from these lines themselves, rather than ending up stuck with them at the end of a possible solution and having no way to explain them.
As you said in a recent post, the point is to make hypotheses and then see whether they hold up or not. My intention was simply to suggest that maybe the biggest stumbling block is a good place to start pulling the thread.
RE: qokeedy qokeedy qokedy qokedy qokeedy - RobGea - 29-09-2025
Could easily be poetry or just literary style, here are 2 quotes from Moby dick ( punctuation stripped ).
"lay it across here rig a dig dig dig huzza
oh for a game cock now to sit upon his head and crow
queequeg dies game mind ye that queequeg dies game
take ye good heed of that queequeg dies game i say game game game"
"poor fellow but whats that he says now hist
i look you look he looks we look ye look they look
why hes getting it by heart hist again
i look you look he looks we look ye look they look
well thats funny"
"Moby-Dick; or, The Whale" by Herman Melville.
RE: qokeedy qokeedy qokedy qokedy qokeedy - RadioFM - 29-09-2025
Going against the 'null hypothesis' here that the repetitive patterns are present in the plaintext, there's therere 8possi9 bilityty that repe ti ti on is a deliberate addition. The 'qokeedy' example you quote is one of the most egregious one, but this "echo" phenomenon is apparent in the majority of the VMS text.
IIRC MarcoP once showed that not only does the echo pattern break down when scrambling the words, but it broke down even worse than in several other NL corpora.
You can take this as evidence that, unless we're dealing with a conlang or a different language family altogether, there can't be a 1:1 correspondence between a running line of Voynichese words and coherent plaintext.
RE: qokeedy qokeedy qokedy qokedy qokeedy - Mark Knowles - 29-09-2025
As I have said I think the repetitious behaviour as in:
qokedy dy sheety qokedy qokeedy qokechdy lol
qokeedy qokeedy qokedy qokedy qokeedy ldy
yshedy qokeedy qokeedy olkeedy otey koldy
Is a function of a large percentage roughly 80% of text in the Voynich manuscript being essentially meaningless filler, designed to confuse or mislead, a bit like the way that null symbols in ciphers are design to mislead. Most people seem to fall into the binary that all the text is meaningful or all the text is meaningless, however there is a middle position between these two extremes.
I suspect that some pages have a higher proportion of filler text than others as some have more information to convey. I didn't recognise that passage of text, however I guessed, maybe by luck, that it would be one of pages with naked women in baths on it as those drawings don't seem to have much fundamental content and seem more like doodles and therefore more consistent with doodle filler text.
RE: qokeedy qokeedy qokedy qokedy qokeedy - magnesium - 29-09-2025
It might be important for us to parse this in terms of the frequencies of individual vords. These three lines of f75r, combined, read as:
qokedy dy sheety qokedy qokeedy qokechdy lol qokeedy qokeedy qokedy qokedy qokeedy ldy yshedy qokeedy qokeedy olkeedy otey koldy
In terms of each word's frequency rank within Voynich B (using the VT transliteration), here's roughly what we're looking at:
(#8) (#34) (#453) (#8) (#6) (#968) (#96) (#6) (#6) (#8) (#8) (#6) (#175) (#335) (#8) (#8) (#90) (#106) (#844)
Within the Naibbe cipher, Voynichese words would be taken by default to be either unigrams or bigrams, with many of the commonest ~100 words (and virtually all of the top 40) representing different ways of encrypting unigrams, aka standalone alphabet letters. So a Naibbe-like parsing of this text could come out as:
A B (bigram 1) A C (bigram 2) (bigram 3) C C A A C (bigram 4) A A D E (bigram 5)
With qokedy, dy, qokeedy, olkeedy, and otey provisionally treated as distinct alphabet letters and the rest of the word types treated as bigrams, where each word would be parsed into a prefix and suffix that mapped to a plaintext alphabet letter.
There are possibly letter assignments here that could yield grammatically and semantically valid Latin, especially if qokedy—which repeats up to four times in a row within Voynich B, consistent with the additive Roman numeral IIII—were taken to be the letter I.
RE: qokeedy qokeedy qokedy qokedy qokeedy - ReneZ - 30-09-2025
(29-09-2025, 08:36 PM)magnesium Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.qokedy dy sheety qokedy qokeedy qokechdy lol qokeedy qokeedy qokedy qokedy qokeedy ldy yshedy qokeedy qokeedy olkeedy otey koldy
I have been 'playing' with a verbose cipher, where this parses into individual characters as follows:
(q)(oke)(d)(y) (d)(y) (shee)(t)(y) (q)(oke)(d)(y) (q)(okee)(d)(y) (q)(oke)(ch)(d)(y) (l)(ol) (q)(okee)(d)(y) (q)(okee)(d)(y) (q)(oke)(d)(y) (q)(oke)(d)(y) (q)(okee)(d)(y) (l)(d)(y) (y)(she)(d)(y) (q)(okee)(d)(y) (q)(okee)(d)(y) (ol)(kee)(d)(y) (ote)(y) (k)(ol)(d)(y)
This already looks far less repetitive, because now most of the repetition is at the character level.
Here, one can even imagine that some of the repetition is the result of mistakes during 'encoding'.
If one takes a second step and considers some characters as nulls, this further reduces to:
(q)(ke)(d) (d) (shee)(t) (q)(ke)(d) (q)(kee)(d) (q)(ke)(ch)(d) (l)(l) (q)(kee)(d) (q)(kee)(d) (q)(ke)(d) (q)(ke)(d) (q)(kee)(d) (l)(d) (y)(she)(d) (q)(kee)(d) (q)(kee)(d) (l)(kee)(d) (te) (k)(l)(d)
It gets even 'better'.
This was perhaps the most extreme case of repetition in the MS (?)
RE: qokeedy qokeedy qokedy qokedy qokeedy - quimqu - 30-09-2025
(30-09-2025, 12:25 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.If one takes a second step and considers some characters as nulls, this further reduces to:
So you think o and y might be null characters? I could understand o as a null character when it starts the word (like let's say, a dot ·) and y like a comma at the end of the words. Is that so?
RE: qokeedy qokeedy qokedy qokedy qokeedy - ReneZ - 30-09-2025
(30-09-2025, 08:05 AM)quimqu Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.So you think o and y might be null characters? I could understand o as a null character when it starts the word (like let's say, a dot ·) and y like a comma at the end of the words. Is that so?
There are many possibilities. These are just what I would call "what if..." hypotheses.
The bit I am most tempted to believe is that the 'o' in 'ok', 'ot', 'or' and 'ol' is not meaningful.
This is one thing that helps to increase entropy.
The whole verbose cipher I mentioned above keeps an alphabet size below 26 and increases both the single character and the bigram entropies to normal levels (Latin, Italian).